Class Enchantment Part III

Class Enchantment, continued from Part II

In the scene of Gaz and Dave dashing to the car we see a swerve away from wage labor; in the next scene Lomper and Guy swerve away from heterosexual masculinity and toward homosexual desire; and in the third and fourth scenes there are swerves toward what might be called “embodied communality.” Here we can begin to think about noncapitalist class relations and a postmodern politics of class.

As steelworkers, the men were subjected to capitalist exploitation. They were paid a wage (the monetary form of their necessary labor), and their surplus labor, over and above what was necessary for subsistence, was appropriated as surplus value by the capitalists, the board of directors of the steel-producing firm. This wealth belonged to capital, to distribute as they saw fit — perhaps to shareholders as dividends, perhaps to managers as bonuses, perhaps to purchase firms in other industries and drain away investment from steel.

Despite their exploitation, understood and resentfully accepted, as wage earners the men experienced an imaginary economic completeness, an apparent self-sufficiency and independence from society at large. But their situation has now been reversed. In the line at the unemployment office they are positioned as insufficient and dependent individuals, their subsistence needs being met by the state (albeit through redistributions of social surplus to which they have probably contributed). While their newly experienced incompleteness is a condition of community, it is one that has not yet taken (and may never take) a positive form.

But as the men’s shoulders start to swivel and their hips begin to thrust in time with the music, we see a shared bodily pleasure in group play and performance that begins to overcome their individuation as bodies in crisis over masculinity and employment. And as the performance takes shape, and takes hold in their minds, we see their growing recognition that by working together they have more earning capacity as well as direct control over the economic resources generated by the group. (This is presented as fantasy rather than as a business plan, though not fantasy in the sense of illusion.) We see acceptance of a fluid hierarchy as leadership roles circulate around the group, from Gaz whose original idea it was to become strippers and who raises the money to rent the club, to ex-foreman Gerald who has the skill to teach dancing and who therefore “directs” the group, to Dave who takes on the public role as announcer at the final performance. All this adds up to a willingness to become communal subjects, to accept their incompleteness, interdependence and connection across differences of age, race, sexuality, body type, financial need and social status. It also enables them to exploit their bodies in a jointly conceived “communist” class relation in which surplus will be communally produced and collectively distributed. What emerges is a videographic fantasy of a class relationship understood from the perspective of potential and connection, rather than separateness, rip off and alienation.

The bodily swerves are only momentary glimmers, however. How can such instances of enchantment lead to more sustained practices of communality and even to permanent escape from old forms of subjection? The film shows us the way. As Gerald equivocates, weighing his new job and social standing against the pleasure of the dance, it is the others who encourage him: “Come on, Gerald.” “Yeah, you can do it, Gerald,” they say. The next set of clips illustrates the effectivity of what might be called the “constitutive outside” — the potentiating force, not in this case of the body with a mind of its own, but of a becoming community with desires that call forth resolve and energetic enactment from the neophyte performers.

Becoming Community 1 (third set of clips: 3 mins 12 secs)

Girls on the street: the men are out putting up posters for their performance when they run into two women acquaintances who taunt them about what they have to offer compared to the Chippendales, the male strippers who were such a success. Gaz is goaded to promise the full monty (“this lot go all the way”). With lecherous but...